My daily readings 02/15/2011

A lot has changed since the last time Ma was in negotiations with Silicon Valley. Back then it was companies like Yahoo that were surging, while China seemed an uncertain gamble. Today, two of the five largest Internet companies are Chinese, and TaoBao and payments company Alipay are two of the hottest private assets on the global Web. As we saw with Tencent’s purchase of Riot Games this month, a decade after most Valley companies failed to do well in China, China is getting more aggressive about expanding in the US.

Back in late December of last year, we noted a huge milestone for photo-sharing app Instagram: a million users. As we noted at the time, remarkably, it took them only three months to hit the mark. That’s crazy when you consider it took Foursquare a full year to hit that mark. And it took Twitter two years! Well now Instagram’s insane growth has also been made to look small: by Instagram.